December 6, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
While dozens of people have lived there over the years—including six right now—the International Space Station is unlike any other home. Its residents sleep zipped into bags tethered to the wall so they don’t float away. They pee into a plastic hose that suctions urine into a processor and then...

December 1, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
Sometime in the mid-2020s, the United States plans to launch a new member of its fleet of space observatories, one with a field of view 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, will spend six years scanning the universe. It will...

November 30, 2017
Sometime in the mid-2020s, the United States plans to launch a new member of its fleet of space observatories, one with a field of view 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, will spend six years scanning the universe. It will...

November 13, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
Nearly two months after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, many residents are still without power and struggling to get access to water, food, and basic services. This week, a failed transmission line knocked out what little of the island’s electrical grid had been restored, temporarily leaving thousands of people in...

October 11, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
Rumors that the Trump administration was more interested in the moon than Mars began circulating days after the inauguration. Leaked memos published in February revealed the president’s advisers wanted NASA to send astronauts there by 2020, one part in a bigger plan to focus on activities near Earth rather than...

October 10, 2017
Rumors that the Trump administration was more interested in the moon than Mars began circulating days after the inauguration. Leaked memos published in February revealed the president’s advisers wanted NASA to send astronauts there by 2020, one part in a bigger plan to focus on activities near Earth rather than...

October 6, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
On October 4, 1957, a beach ball-shaped satellite launched into space from the Kazakh desert. The satellite joined Earth’s journey around the sun, which is why its creators named it Sputnik, Russian for “traveling companion.” Sputnik circled the planet about every hour-and-a-half, traveling at 18,000 miles per hour as it...

October 3, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
It’s just after sunrise in New York City. The sky is bathed in pinks and orange as people walk along a long dock toward a white ship. They board the vessel and it sails out to a launchpad further out in the water, where a spaceship strapped to a giant...

September 15, 2017
In the early morning hours on Friday, Cassini cruised into Saturn’s upper atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour, getting closer to the planet than ever before. The bus-sized orbiter, jostled by the dense atmosphere, fired its thrusters to keep its antenna pointed at Earth and transmitted data...

August 28, 2017
FROM NEXTGOV
As tropical storm Harvey continues to drench Houston, turning streets into muddy rivers, NASA workers are keeping watch over a giant $8.6 billion space telescope at the edge of the city. The James Webb Space Telescope is currently sitting inside a massive, sealed cryogenic chamber at the Johnson Space Center,...